Young Children and Formal Education

Thoughts and Reflections of Craig H. Hart

I have had the opportunity to conduct research studies that provide insight into how parents can help children get off to a good start in formal schooling.15 While obvious to most, in all the research I’ve conducted around early childhood education, it is quite clear that parents have to make very conscious decisions about their children and their education. One thing we’ve found is that where parents push young children too hard and too early to excel academically, the children can end up disengaged and disinterested. Now, these are statistical probabilities. There are some children who have the temperament and the resilience and the interest to do well even when pushed by parents, but, again, we need to know and be sensitive to our children’s needs and abilities.

As an example, I was visiting a kindergarten class a number of years ago, at a time when state core standards required that by the end of kindergarten the children should be able to tell time. From the developmental data, we know that 5- to 6-year-old children are in the preoperational stage of development, meaning they are limited in their abilities to think abstractly. They’re more concrete and hands-on; in simple addition and subtraction problems, they are accurate with the real objects in front of them, but are often not as accurate if given the story problem verbally.16

So, here was a kindergarten teacher who was becoming very frustrated because she had being going over the concept of time for weeks. She would ask them, “Where’s 12:15 on the clock? Where’s 12:45?” (How many five year- olds do you know who can count to 45, by the way?) At that age, kids have tendencies to center on one aspect of a problem, so if you have the big hand going around, they’re going to focus on that; and they don’t differentiate between it and the small hand. These kids were just being pushed and pushed and pushed, and they were also laying their heads on the desks and yawning and just totally checked out of this teacher’s presentation. Children’s minds are wired in ways during the early years that help them learn foundational principles about their physical and social world, but which preclude temporarily some concepts that adults find easy. Much educational effort and time can be wasted if teachers and parents are not tuned into the divinely ordained process of development. Providing developmentally appropriate educational experiences, on the other hand, keep children eager, active and engaged in developing knowledge, skills and dispositions that will help them throughout their lives.

When very young children are pushed into lots of workbook and abstract worksheet activities in school classrooms or even at home––flashcards, drills, memorization––there may be some success. However, research shows that for many children, this dampens their natural motivation toward learning, as well as their curiosity.


We have also found in several systematic observational studies that children in more highly structured preschool and kindergarten classes exhibit almost twice the levels of stress behavior (e.g., auto-manipulation of clothing, body parts) when compared to children in more developmentally appropriate environments, and that early stress levels factor into how children adjust to elementary school. So when parents are trying to make decisions about what kinds of educational experiences to provide for their children in their early years, it is helpful to know that the best early childhood curriculums balance child self-guided experiential learning with direct instructional approaches that are tailored to individual child and age-group developmental needs. Alter-native one-size-fits all curriculum practices appear likely to do more harm than good.

Thoughts and Reflections of Craig H. Hart